Don’t Blame Dallas for Kennedy’s Death

Nov. 21 (Bloomberg) -- Cities don’t commit crimes, but
Dallas continues to feel guilty all the same. Fifty years after
the assassination of John F. Kennedy, many in the city are still
burdened by the memory of that day -- and the sense that, in
some way they cannot put into words, they were responsible.

I hadn’t appreciated the pervasiveness of this view in one
of my favorite cities until I spent some time there this month
participating in a symposium on the assassination organized by
the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. I had been
invited to talk about the lingering effects of Kennedy’s death
on our politics. I wound up learning a great deal about the way
that Dallasites continue to carry the trauma.

One participant described his work with black teenagers.
These young men, he said -- kids born in the 1990s -- referred
constantly to the burden they carried because they’re from the
city where Kennedy was killed.

Toward the end of the day, a French journalist remarked
that in Europe, Dallas is known for three things: the Dallas
Cowboys football team, the television show about J.R. Ewing and
family, and the assassination of the 35th U.S. president. Locals
chimed in, several noting that on their own travels abroad,
strangers even today say things like, “Oh, the city that killed
Kennedy.”

Camelot’s Spell

At first blush, it’s hard to understand the city’s burden.
Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in Washington, but nobody today
talks of the nation’s capital as if the city somehow killed the
16th president -- just as nobody imagines that Washington had
something against Ronald Reagan, who could easily have died
after being shot by John Hinckley in 1981. Sara Jane Moore was
able to fire two rounds at Gerald Ford outside a San Francisco
hotel in 1975, but nobody claims that the city wanted him dead.

Dallas, however, has faced special blame from the start.
“Everywhere we went for the next couple of years, people booed
us when we ran out on the field,” former Dallas Cowboy Bob
Lilly told NBC Sports. The whole city felt the weight. “It was
a shock how much the world hated us,” wrote Pulitzer Prize
winner Lawrence Wright, a Dallas native, on the 20th anniversary
of the assassination. “The world decided that Kennedy had died
in enemy territory, that no matter who had killed him, we had
willed him dead. And yet the truth is that we were under the
spell of Camelot like everyone else.”

The Dallas-did-it meme persists. It’s reflected in Oliver
Stone’s version of the assassination. At the symposium I
attended, more than one speaker attributed the killing -- and
the city’s reputation -- to the atmosphere of extremism that
reigned there at the time.

And Dallas of the early 1960s was indeed shot through with
far-right fury. This was the city where, during the 1960
campaign, angry crowds had hurled invective at Lyndon Johnson, a
son of the state, calling him a “damned Catholic Yankee.” This
was the city where, just a month before the assassination,
United Nations Ambassador Adlai Stevenson had been threatened by
a mob and spat upon. This was the city where, on the very day of
the assassination, the John Birch Society purchased a black-bordered full-page newspaper advertisement asserting that
Kennedy was soft on communism.

The irony, as Kennedy biographer Robert Dallek points out,
is that if Lee Harvey Oswald had any politics at all, he was
very much a man of the far left. The Secret Service, concerned
about Kennedy’s safety, kept close watch during those fateful
days before Dallas on extremists of the right but made no effort
to track extremists of the left.

Nation Deprived

Even today, there is an unfortunate persistence to the myth
that right-wing extremism was responsible. Two years ago, Frank
Rich wrote in New York magazine that Kennedy was brought down by
a “particular strain of virulent hatred” that is still alive
today. Some of the Dallas residents attending the symposium this
month expressed the same sentiment.

Certainly the assassination changed Dallas. The burden
lingers -- think again of those young black men -- but the
effects are complex. As psychologists James W. Pennebaker and
Becky L. Banasik found, deaths from heart disease, murder and
suicide increased significantly in Dallas in the years
immediately following the assassination. But so did rates of
charitable giving and economic growth.

Over the years, many theories have been suggested to
explain the special guilt that lingers in Dallas. The extremism,
of course. The hatred. The notion that Dallas was in the South,
viewed by much of the nation, in Wright’s words, as “enemy
territory.”

Dallek points to a more plausible explanation. Lincoln’s
assassination was somehow part of the larger tragedy of the
Civil War. The sudden death of Franklin Roosevelt might have
been more traumatic had it not occurred at a moment when it was
obvious that World War II was about to be won. “By contrast,”
Dallek writes, “Kennedy’s sudden violent death seemed to
deprive the country and the world of a better future.” He was
killed at the very moment when the U.S. was at the height of its
confidence and power. An explanation was so necessary because
the trauma was so unexpected.

I recently spent a year studying Kennedy in connection with
a novel about the Cuban missile crisis. My bias going in, I
freely confess, was that he had been a fairly ordinary
president, his accomplishments exaggerated in our collective
memories because of the bullet that took his life.

But in the course of researching the book, I realized how
wrong I was. Kennedy was an extraordinary president at an
extraordinary moment in history. One reason that liberals and
conservatives alike are able to claim convincingly that he was
one of them is that he held the middle ground with a reliable
tenacity scarcely seen since. In the particular case of Cuba,
many others who sat in the Oval Office might have followed their
doves into accepting Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba as a
permanent part of the geopolitical landscape or followed their
hawks into World War III.

A Reckoning

What Kennedy’s supporters said about him was mostly true.
He was dashing and handsome and terribly young: the first
president born in the 20th century. And although he had to cope
with the lingering effects of recession, the divisions of the
civil-rights movement, and the nation’s constant fear of Soviet
military and technological prowess, his verve and charm and
confidence kept his approval ratings in the 70 percent range
just a year before his re-election campaign.

In short, the nation loved him. So did the world. For the
snuffing out of that life, there had to be a reckoning. Oswald
was himself killed, and so he couldn’t face judgment. Aside from
the myriad shadowy conspirators in whom many Americans still
fervently believe, nobody was left to blame but the city.

Which brings me back to what I said at the outset: Cities
don’t commit crimes. People do. Half a century is past time for
the world to stop punishing Dallas, and for that marvelous city
to stop punishing itself.

(Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg View columnist and a
professor of law at Yale University. He is the author of “The
Violence of Peace: America’s Wars in the Age of Obama” and the
novel “The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln.” Follow him on
Twitter at @StepCarter.)